Dear BTF Community,
In this interview, Grant Findlay-Shirras, an accomplished entrepreneur with a track record of scaling companies and driving long-term success, discusses:
- Building a multi-million dollar company and exiting from it;
- A broker’s role in the process; and
- Why a business shouldn’t be so dependent on the owner.
Enjoy,
Mark
Grant Findlay-Shirras is an accomplished entrepreneur with a track record of scaling companies and driving long-term success.
As the Co-Founder of Parkbench, he bootstrapped the business to $37 million in revenue, serving 500,000+ local businesses and 7,000+ real estate agents, while building a remote team of 88.
Parkbench, a graduate of 500 Startups and NAR REACH, became the #1 relationship-based marketing solution for agents and won the 2nd Best Place to Work in Canada.
After exiting Parkbench in 2024, he now helps entrepreneurs achieve similar success as an executive business coach and growth consultant. He specializes in scaling businesses, optimizing operations, and building people-first cultures that drive both performance and fulfillment.
Grant is currently seeking to invest in and acquire businesses, focusing on preserving the legacy, team, and brand while unlocking new growth opportunities.
He has Baller Media, a consulting company, as well as Hylo AI.
“My wife and I are trying to acquire two interior design and staging companies. Our main focus moving forward is on acquiring companies,” he said, adding the goal is to fix up those companies and grow them.
Findlay-Shirras, who is based in Kelowna, BC and originally from Vancouver, will be participating in a panel discussion at the upcoming Vancouver Business Transitions Forum on November 6. The session is called Selling a Business 101: Exploring the Basic ‘Who, When, What & How of Transition’.
He and his wife Amanda launched Parkbench in 2014 in Toronto. They exited the company in January of this year.
“We had just recovered from going to zero during COVID, and grinded hard again, and in our nine-year period, we did $37 million, but went to zero four times. And it gets exhausting after a while. And so come 2021 we started to get offers, and that’s when we’re like, ‘Okay, we just rebuilt the company again. I think we should sell it’,” he said
“I came to this realization. If you don’t grow as a company and create growth opportunities for your employees, they leave because if they do the same thing over and over and over again, they get bored and they leave. It’s the same thing for owners. If the owners are doing the same thing over and over and over again, and you can’t break through certain ceilings to be able to do other things that are interesting, and your skills are getting stagnant, you get antsy, especially my wife and I think we’re like serial people. So we decided we wanted to sell.”
Findlay-Shirras said people need a broker when it comes time to sell their business.
“Now the broker may sell you on the fact that they’re going to bring you offers. They’re probably not. They didn’t. The offers I got were from people that I had built relationships with, and I knew they were going to put an offer on my company for years. But the broker is helpful in being the bad guy in negotiations, and they’re helpful in doing work, because you need to have a growing company, and it’s a lot of work to prep and do the due diligence and the data room and all that stuff . . . You will sell it for a lot more, and you’ll have a better outcome if your company is growing and not dying. You will be able to spend the time to make sure that happens if you have a broker helping you in place to do all the prep.
“I think people need to really realize that, like I’m buying a company, and if I’m buying a job, I’m not buying the company. So you better have built something that doesn’t need you as a business owner. The less your business needs you, the easier it is to sell. And so you need to have people and systems in place so that a buyer can take it on and easily keep it going before they have time to fix it up and grow it and do whatever the hell they want with it. And if the thing will crumble when you leave, you’re not going to either sell at all, or you’re not going to get as much.”
Findlay-Shirras said when he is looking to buy companies he wants something that is AI and recession-proof.
“These are big macro trends right now, I think the economy is going to be in a not so great position for a while. So I want to make sure that it doesn’t need a good economic market to succeed. I want to make sure that AI is not going to destroy the business. And on the contrary, I want to look for businesses where the owner hasn’t implemented a bunch of things that my wife and I are good at,” he said.
“This is why everyone will buy different businesses, because my skills and experiences are different than another person who’s buying businesses. So my developer is looking to buy businesses, and he should buy businesses where he can leverage his development skills. My wife and I we are good team builders and sales and marketing. So we want to look at businesses who have not started to do marketing, digital marketing, social media, paid advertising, build sales teams, all these things, because we know how to do that.
“So we look for companies that we’re interested in, that we like the product and service, that our skills and experiences would add value to that business. I don’t want a perfect business. I want a business with some holes in it because that creates the opportunity for it. But then I also want to make sure that I’m not buying a job and that the owner is truly an owner of that business. They’re not in the weeds, daily operating.”
Mario Toneguzzi is a veteran of the media industry for more than 40 years and named in 2021 a Top Ten Business Journalist in the world and only Canadian. He also made the RETHINK’s global list as a Top Retail Expert 2024.